Welcome!

liveMeta focuses on tools, tips and technologies for the information professionals, whether they are Information Architects, Data or Object Modelers.

Our aim is to supply hype-free, tried and tested tools, references and advice that can make a difference in your workday. Don’t expect silver bullet software and magic consulting recipes but rather practical toolkits and down-to-earth recommendations.

As a young but growing website, we’ve decided to tackle one of the very first steps any information professional should take, whether he’s looking at maintaining or reengineering a system (which represents nearly all projects today as brand new ‘greenfield’ development that does not use/reuse or transform existing data is very rare) : KNOW YOUR DATA.

Experience shows that most companies have a poor track record of documenting and understanding the actual data they have in their database. Logical Data Models or other business models, when they exist, are often obsolete or incomplete and human knowledge, when it survived reorganizations, retirement and layoffs tends to be technical rather than business oriented (sure I know what this field is, it’s 3 characters long and it flows to application x).

Therefore one of the first steps of an information professional when arriving in a new team/domain/project is often to embark onto a data discovery journey. Whether he’s lucky enough to have good documentation available or not, I’d highly recommend that he takes time to look at the actual data, verify its real nature (what’s this telephone number doing in a tax field ?) and assess its quality. Having an efficient way of looking up allowed values list is also an asset.

Great and complex data discovery and analysis tools exists, but their licenses are expensive and unless they’re already in place, getting a purchase order approved through most companies’ purchasing bureaucracy may take longer than the time allocated to the project, therefore the wily information professional will never go out without his universal SQL client, that will allow him to have a peek at the data in most of the databases.

Therefore, we're glad to offer the following SQL Client, free of charge and adware/spyware . There's no trick and no strings attached although all constructive comments regarding bugs and how to improve the product would be appreciated.

But looking at data in today’s world doesn’t only require a SQL Client tool, it also requires a decent knowledge of SQL and we hope that some will find our simple SQL Tutorial useful while others will refresh their memory with our SQL Reference guide.